


Giving Up The Ghost

by Britpacker



Category: The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: Between Seasons/Series, F/M, Politics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-20
Updated: 2014-05-07
Packaged: 2018-01-16 09:53:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1343182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Britpacker/pseuds/Britpacker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She never believed she would see him lose the will to fight. There again, Sam Cassidy never thought her beloved Party would make such a hopeless incompetent its leader.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Leader

**Author's Note:**

> Set between the third and fourth series. I'm sure Malcolm did his best to make his Inglorious Leader look electable during those first two years in Opposition, but some tasks are just hopeless, aren't they? Rated for later chapters.

Flashbulbs popped. Amid a storm of applause the newly elected Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition made her way to the stage, staggering slightly under the vigorous thumps bestowed to her back by the more enthusiastic of her attendant supporters. Clustered together at the side of the room her defeated opponents managed strained smiles and mechanical applause while the photographers and newsmen swung from one to the other then back to the beaming, slightly bewildered victor herself.

“Mrs Murray! Mrs Murray! Who d’ you want as Deputy Leader? Who’ll be on your front bench?”

“Oh shut up, you twats!”

Oliver Reeder’s exhale echoed her own thoughts so precisely it took a moment for Sam Cassidy to identify the voice. Her hands smacking rhythmically together, a bright smile pinned painfully across her delicately-carved features, the PA to the Party’s Director of Communications could identify each of the shouting hacks by their voices and nicknames – usually crude, and invariably coined by her employer. Their real names she didn’t know. Sam devoutly wished to keep it that way. 

She despised them all.

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you.” Nicola Murray M.P. struggled for a few moments with the microphone, set too high on the lectern as if it had been intended for someone taller – Dan Miller, perhaps, shuffling his shiny-shod feet like a toddler in dire need of the bathroom – before giving up and pushing herself up onto tiptoes instead, just the crown of her brown head visible from the main body of the room. “I’m enormously honoured by the trust you, my party colleagues and friends, have placed in me. I hope I won’t let you down!”

“Don’t we all?”

The hiss from her left, Sam reckoned, came from Helen: the same wide-eyed, eager puppy who’d attached herself to the leg of the former Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Citizenship the moment she’d entered the leadership race.

“And that’s what friends are for,” she breathed.

Only one pair of ears was sharp enough to catch the words. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, girl,” Malcolm Tucker rumbled, stooping to direct the words straight into her ear. 

A gust of laughter swept the room. On stage behind the new leader the Party establishment applauded and stage left the defeated candidates’ tight smiles twisted another few notches tighter. “Mrs Murray, surely you'd prefer to appoint your own Deputy Leader?”

“I’m quite happy to accept any decision made by my Party. I’m sure the membership will have chosen wisely.”

In the silence that followed somebody’s sniggers resounded like a rifle shot. Sam suspected it was Reeder’s. “Even he can see the flippin’ irony,” she muttered.

“Long as she doesn’t, we’re OK.” Nicola, like most senior politicians of Malcolm’s acquaintance, didn’t do irony. She didn’t do humour very well either, which was a pity. Wit had been known to work in lieu of properly thought out policies. Long and bitter experience had proven to him that plain verbal incontinence never had quite the same effect.

Sam was acutely aware of how taut he was holding himself. Malcolm always stood tall and straight-backed but under tension he could appear to freeze, an aura of ice forming around him that touched everyone in his immediate vicinity – most often, she considered, herself. It happened a lot when senior Party figures were facing a roomful of journalists whose professional duty it was to make them look like twats in front of the widest possible audience.

In her experience, few made that particular job easier than the new leader.

“I wish she had a _Stop_ button,” she sighed.

“I’d settle for fuckin’ _Mute_ , love.” Malcolm had perfected stoicism in the face of his masters’ ineptitude long ago; never had she envied it more. 

“And if you wouldn’t mind, the suspense is killing me,” Nicola announced brightly, clasping her hands on the lectern. “Er – would somebody mind telling me who I’m going to be blaming when things go wrong, please?”

Silence descended like a moth-eaten blanket. “That’s what deputies are supposed to do – it’s an old Westminster joke,” Nicola explained, and even from the other end of the room Sam thought she could see the poor woman’s knuckles starting to whiten as her hands gripped tighter around the lectern. “Anyway Carol, as you’re mistress of ceremonies – mustn’t say master, we’re all great believers in gender equality on our side of the House, unlike – erm, well, perhaps you could…”

People were starting to duck heads and shuffle feet. “Malcolm, this is going to be a fucking disaster.”

Even Ollie could see it. “She’s useless! We can’t let this happen!”

“It’s already fucking happened, all right?” The words were gritted out between his teeth, which somehow made them more terrifying than if he’d bellowed them. “The grassroots like a politician who fucks up now and again, it makes ‘em look more human. The front bench’d all sooner have her than somebody vaguely fucking competent who might actually win us an election this side of the fucking Apocalypse. Grit your teeth and get on with it, stick man; it’s what the fucking Party wants.”

He didn’t flinch when Dan Miller was declared Deputy Leader, beating Fatty by a comfortable margin. “Could’ve been worse,” she breathed, half-closing her eyes in the hope the embrace between the pair on stage would looks vaguely more genuine. As Nicola made a half-hearted joke about having “the good-looking one” at her side for the next few years, she did a rapid reassessment. “Or possibly not.”

Boiling water could have been turned into instant ice cubes between them when the new leadership team raised each other’s hands amid a shower of party poppers and a spray of champagne. Sam’s innards clenched painfully.

“This is going to be a disaster.”

“Probably.” In private the supreme spin doctor had never been one to sugar the pill. For the first time, Sam regretted that. “Still, gotta be positive, yeah? There’s always the chance J.B’s barmy army will be even fucking worse!”


	2. Power Players

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s all about power to you.” The Leader of the Opposition shouldn’t need it explaining, should she?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nicola’s been leading the Party for some months. It’s not going well but Malcolm, fighting on gallantly, is still trying to find a chink in the Government’s armour…

“I’m not going to do it, Malcolm, and that’s final. Ferret-Fucker’s marital problems are not a matter for discussion at Prime Minister’s fucking Questions, all right?”

“I don’t give a shit if he’s been using half his son’s year at fucking Eton as rent boys, but employing his mistress as a Commons assistant is against every rule in the fuckin’ book! He’s Work and fucking Pensions, for God’s sake! Did you not notice the clause in the House of Commons guidelines? Nepotism’s up there with tempting kiddies off the street with pot-spiked fucking lollipops!”

Her desk, Nicola Murray decided there and then, needed to be widened. Looming over it, anger crackling around him like an electrical storm, Malcolm Tucker’s wrath stretched out in a lowering black cloud to envelop her. “His wife’s walked out. Their daughter calling him a twat’s been retweeted a million times. Don’t you think he’s going through enough?”

“I’m not his psychiatrist, and his trouser problem isn’t the issue here. He’s been using taxpayers’ money to fund his girlfriend’s edible fucking knickers, and _that_ is an abuse of power, right there!”

“This isn’t about power, Malcolm! This is about a man’s _life_!”

It wasn’t his anger that made her snap; Nicola had faced that a thousand times, and not even her elevation to a position of ultimate authority in the Party could compel him to restrain it. No, it was the weariness, his undisguised contempt that hung in the air between them, unspoken but tangible, that tipped her over the edge.

“That’s all it ever is to you, isn’t it? Fucking _power_! Had you ever considered that some of us came into politics to make things _better_ for people, not just to fuck up the other lot even if they are a bunch of inbred landed fucking gentry who keep their tarts in the next stalls to their fucking horses so they have a choice of which to shag first? And yes, I know – that’s one of your fucking lines!”

“Yeah, ‘cause you’d never be insensitive enough to say that about anybody yourself, right? Jesus Christ, Nic’la, how long have you been an M.P?” Watching him pace across her office was making her feel faintly dizzy but Nicola had realised long ago she could never look away. “How are you expecting to make things better for anybody from the wrong side of the fucking House? You _need_ power to get things done, and in case you hadn’t noticed we’re what’s called The Opposition now. We haven’t _got_ any fucking power!”

“I _am_ aware of how government works, Malcolm. I _was_ a minister, you know.”

“Oh God I remember that.” Too late she remembered the cardinal rule; don’t get sarcastic with the Director of Communications, even if you are supposed to be his boss. “What was your most notable achievement at DoSAC again? Making Remtard look almost fucking competent at Energy and Climate Change? Falling over your own fuckin’ feet outside Number Ten during the G8 summit? Or almost supporting the key worker housing sell-off until you realised that spineless shyster of a husband of yours’d go crying to Mummy if it damaged his fuckin’ CONTRACTS?”

“There’s no need to bring my family into this!”

“You’re the one who backed off a policy you believed in for your family’s fucking benefit!”

“You should be grateful to James! You hated the whole idea anyway!”

“Yes, because it’s against everything I thought this fucking party stood for! You were ready to throw hundreds of low-paid public servants out onto the fuckin’ streets, right up ‘til the moment you remembered whose company stood to make a fortune out of maintaining the poor cunts’ flats in the first place!”

It wasn’t dignified. It didn’t look authoritative. Still, she couldn’t help herself. When he yelled at her, Nicola yelled back. “Now the government’s planning to go ahead with it anyway and take the credit for saving the Treasury millions!”

“Which it’ll pass straight on to Ferret-Fucker at Work & Pensions to cover housing benefit for the poor bastards who’ve been kicked out of their fucking homes! Jesus _Christ_ , who does this government’s accounts, J.B’s two-year-old?”

“Then we can attack them on policy grounds! That’s what people _want_ us to do, Malcolm, stand up for matters of principle, not fling whatever personal shit we can find in the name of fucking _power_!”

“Nicola.” She knew she was in trouble when he stopped dead and emphasised every syllable of her given name. “You’re the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, right? If I have to be explaining to you why power matters in politics darling, you might just be in the wrong fucking job, yeah?”

“I know that power matters, Malcolm. I’m just not prepared to humiliate another human being in the name of getting it!”

“This isn’t your kids’ posh kindergarten, this is the fucking Westminster jungle! D’ you know why they call it that? Do you?”

“Yes, and it’s not a fucking compliment! The ordinary voter doesn’t care about our private lives, they just want us to do our jobs and make their lives better!”

“Which you’re not doing by letting those coked-up sheep-shagging wankers off every fucking hook they get their fancy fuckin’ braces caught on! Do you want to be Prime Minister or not?”

“Yes!”

“Then stop being squeamish and slap that bunch of granite-hearted granny-freezers with any fucking weapon they’re stupid enough to throw at us, including Ferret-Fucker’s taxpayer-funded kinky knickers, right? Jesus Christ! Maybe I _am_ obsessed with power, but did you ever stop and wonder why? Or do you think I keep feeding my bollocks into this meat grinder on a daily basis just for the privilege of keeping you off the fuckin’ dole?”

“I’m the one keeping you in a fucking job!”

“Yeah, a full-time one running around with a bucket of hot water and a fucking mop to clear up the toxic fuckin’ waste that comes out of your mouth!” As if he was shocked by his own virulence, Malcolm rocked back on his heels and rubbed a long, thin hand vigorously across his face. “Look, I’m sorry. I just think we should be hitting Ferret-Fucker and J.B with everything we’ve got, and a nice, juicy wee scandal we can sell as a matter of public fucking interest is exactly what we’ve been waiting for.”

“I’m sorry, Malcolm. I’m not prepared to do that; not yet. Why can’t we try and be _positive_ for a change?”

Both eyebrows shot up. “What, like we did last month with the youth unemployment figures?” he snorted. “Yeah, that went well! Your poll ratings in that age group are lower than Easy Betty’s knickers on a Saturday night after that piece of Nicola Murray positive thinking!”

She winced, but refused to back down. “All I said was that there’s some slight evidence to suggest that those with the initiative and the willpower can find a job out there somewhere!”

“Which means those extra four thousand on the figures are bone-idle tossers who can’t drag their fat arses off their sofas long enough to walk five minutes down the road to clean the fucking toilets at McDonalds! All right.”

He raised both hands, effectively stopping the wounded reply on her tongue. “Have it your way. We’ll take the moral fucking high ground, always providing we don’t slip down the shite pile on the way there. Ferret-Fucker’s all-expenses tart is none of our fucking business, whoever paid for her fake tan and New York shopping trips, because we’re above that sort of thing, yeah? Just remember next time your fuckin’ husband almost gets his shifty mug plastered on the front pages for consorting with call girls again…”

“I said thank you for killing that, didn’t I?”

“Yes but if Cal Richards ever gets those pictures, _darling_ , don’t go expecting any gratitude for this, all right? He might keep an SS uniform in his dressin’ up box, but he knows his fucking job, which is to make you look about as Prime Ministerial as a Labrador puppy with its tail in the fucking fire, OK?”

“OK!” Fight, fight, fight. It was all she ever did: with James, with her children, with the fractious Shadow Cabinet, and with him. At least Malcolm fought fair, most of the time. She always knew where he stood, and Nicola supposed she should appreciate that. “We’ll keep it there as a fallback position, OK? But it might be wise to check our front bench for potential trouble before we…”

“I’ve got a file six inches thick on every one of ye.” Hers was thicker but Malcolm saw no point in frightening the jittery trollop with that little titbit. “Just – please, Nicola. We’re in politics to help people, and we can only do that when we’re in power. _Please_ stop acting as if it’s the fucking bubonic plague! Sam, yeah, what’s the problem?”

Her office; his reaction to the earnest tapping on her half-open door. Well, Nicola supposed it was obvious his secretary wanted him, not her. 

“Absolutely nothing,” Sam Cassidy informed him the moment there was a solid oak barrier between themselves and any flapping ears. “Your fifteen minutes is up, and you know what the doctor said about your blood pressure. Besides, they’re laying bets in the office on how long it’ll be before you throttle her.”

“Two more minutes might’ve done it.” She laughed softly. “I’m serious, Sam. The woman’s a fucking liability.”

“There’s time for things to turn ‘round; she’s only been leader six months, after all.”

He grimaced, ushering her through her tiny office and straight into his own, barely more spacious but much less organised, ahead of him. “Is that all? Feels more like six fuckin’ years.”

“Oh no, we were in power six years ago.” Catching him by the lapels she pulled him down, unresisting, for a quick, hard kiss. “And she was on the bloody backbenches where she couldn’t do any damage! You know my feelings about Dan, but honestly… I’m starting to think we’d have been better biting the bullet and giving him the top job when Tom stood down.”

“You know the grassroots wouldn’t have stood for it.” He didn’t, she noticed, actually disagree; usually a sign he couldn’t, and that didn’t happen often with Malcolm Tucker. When he let himself fall into his big leather chair, tiredly rubbing a hand across his face, she almost wished he had.

Tired. She’d seem him tired in government, of course; fucking shattered from fighting a dozen ministerial fires at once, especially in the latter years. Somehow, even when he’d known deep down the effort was futile, simply making it had raised his adrenaline levels, keeping exhaustion at bay with the thrill of the fight.

Now – now, he was enervated. Drained. 

Defeated, and it broke her heart.

“We can turn it around, Malc. J.B’s bunch of inbred droids in bed with those muddle-headed twats… that’s about as permanent as Jordan’s latest engagement, for Christ’s sake! How can we _not_ win?”

“Fucked if I know, pet, but wee Nicky Krankie’ll find a way.” He took a sip from the mug at his right hand, craggy features wrinkling into a comical grimace as stone-cold liquid hit the back of his throat. “Bollocks! She’s even got me wastin’ good coffee now!”

“I’ll get you another one.” Usually she’d chide him about his caffeinated blood, but seeing him so dejected Sam didn’t have the heart. “And we’re finishing early tonight, OK? You’re going to whip up one of those fantastic Italian suppers of yours, we’re ignoring the news channels, and after we’ve eaten I’m going to tie you to the bed and shag the living daylights out of you as a reward for not murdering our inglorious leader. How does that sound?”

Power. Sam knew what it was – and why she needed it – when his tired eyes lit up for her with that special spark. “Oh, darlin’,” he growled, “Sounds like my day just got better! Maybe I’ll hold off killing the sacred fucking cow after all if I’m gonna get rewards like that!”


	3. The Old F.A.R.T.s Club

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another public appearance; another cock-up. Malcolm expects nothing less, but for some reason even those closest to him still think there’s something he can do…

They gathered in the largest meeting room, shuffling in like embarrassed mourners late to a funeral. She was behind schedule of course, an abandoned lectern and the subdued buzz of meaningless conversation being beamed via the BBC from a cavernous City conference hall straight to Party HQ. “I thought Helen said they were OK for time?” Ollie bitched loudly to nobody in particular.

“They probably ran into a lift.” 

“Or fell down the shaft if we’re lucky.”

The voices came from somewhere in the middle of the ruck and instinctively Sam stiffened, waiting for the customary rumble of Glaswegian displeasure. The Leader might be in imminent danger of disappearing up her own gaping arsehole, but Party unity must be seen to be maintained. 

_At least in front of the other fuckers._

She’d got used to certain thoughts sounding in his accent long ago, at around the same time she’d trained herself to anticipate his every reaction. Nowadays she was rarely wrong. 

Each time she was Sam got an icy shiver of panic at the base of her spine. Instinctively she craned her neck, seeking him out among the crowd. 

Leaning casually against the doorframe, arms loosely folded over his chest, he looked like a man totally lost in his own world. She knew him better than that, knew he’d be picking up every whispered word and rustled sweet paper, but still it wasn’t like him to let the snide remark of a very junior aide slip past. 

He looked tired. That was nothing new but studying him closely (and feeling uneasily sure that for once she could get away with it) Sam could see something more than simple physical exhaustion in her lover’s thin face. 

“Oh here they come; Gert and fucking Daisy!” 

Fatty’s bullish bellow turned heads away from the screen, the brows of everyone under the age of sixty furrowing: which, she realised, at least meant they were wearing the appropriate expressions for the moment their Party leader, dashing toward the stage like a crazed shopper on the first day of the sales, caught her heel in the Lord Mayor’s trailing robe and lurched like a felled tree into the rostrum. “Bollocks!" 

“She can’t even fucking walk!” 

“Neither could Tom and he still got to Number Ten.” 

“Yeah, that went well!” 

Ben, Ollie and Colin the Creep. An unholy trinity if ever there’d been one. Sam fired a glare in their direction, willing her boss to intervene. 

He didn’t. 

On the pretext of answering a call – his trick, it never failed – she eased her way to the back of the room and sidled to a halt in the doorway. “Aren’t you going to _say_ something?” she gritted out between clenched teeth. Malcolm’s head shifted a millimetre and back. 

“But they’re laughing at her.” 

“Beats crying, yeah?” 

“Suppose so.” This close she could feel the tension his posture concealed. It tickled her cheek like the first snowflake of a blizzard, a chilly harbinger of trouble to come. “It’s a decent speech.” 

“Fuckin’ should be.” It had taken weeks of argument and more re-writes than any other of his extensive experience and still Malcolm wasn’t convinced they’d done enough. “Still, it doesn’t matter. She’d cock up reading _Janet and John Go Swimming_ to her youngest if there was a fucking microphone around." 

“Showing your age there, Malc.” 

She used the diminutive as a challenge. When he merely grunted the creeping tide of unease in her gut swirled up into a positive tidal wave. 

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all _so_ much for coming.” Nicola always sounded shriller on TV than in the flesh she reminded herself. Invariably the vocal chords settled as she worked through a speech. Things would get better. 

Sam kept telling herself that for the first fifteen minutes. 

Around her, people were starting to fidget. Malcolm shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back, his lips moving over her words a millisecond before the woman on screen. “She’s OK so far,” Sam breathed. He jerked his head. 

“And, just as a broken clock manages to tell the truth twice a day even this Government can, occasionally, get something right,” Nicola announced to a ripple of polite tittering. “And we’re fully in favour of their pledge to rein in the power of the unelected quangos. That’s why _we_ voted last week _against_ the establishment of the Coalition’s shiny new Financial Agencies Regulatory Tribunal – and no, I’m not going to use the obvious acronym, there are more than enough old – well, _you_ know – in that sector already.” 

Applause and laughter rang around two venues at once. “She did that well!” Fat Pat exclaimed. 

“Only because she’s such a fuckin’ prude she couldn’t bring herself to say _farts_ in public,” Malcolm growled. Sam gathered some people genuinely thought he was joking. 

Turning a politician’s weakness into an asset – that was his job, and by inserting one line into an otherwise humdrum speech he had pulled off another small miracle most of the Party wouldn’t even notice. Glummy Mummy still looked like an outraged matron discovering an orgy in the senior girls’ dorm but at least this time they could claim it was deliberate. 

Most of the time she came across miserable, smug or both. Even her unlamented predecessor had usually contrived to manage just one at a time. 

Sam rocked onto her heels, bringing herself that little bit too close for professional comfort to her employer. In spite of himself she could sense Malcolm was beginning to relax. Nicola didn’t do memorable for the right reasons so a forgettable appearance could easily be passed off as a successful appearance. 

If they could ban all coverage of the next election Sam figured they might even have a chance of winning it. And considering the effect his pudding gob tended to have on the electorate, there was even a chance JB might agree. 

At the edge of camera shot she could see Helen grinning manically, her long hair flapping with each encouraging nod of the head Nicola’s way. “She looks like the slow kid at playgroup’s mother,” Ollie squawked indignantly. “Malcolm—“ 

“You’re well out of it, stick man.” 

The insult was almost cordial. And that, Sam thought gloomily, did worry them. 

“The global economic crisis is far from over,” Nicola intoned solemnly, shuffling the notes on her lectern. Small furrows, painfully visible in high definition, cut into her forehead and she coughed, hesitant for the first time. “And, erm, as we all know it’s hit this country harder than others – not all the others, of course; we’re better off than Greece, for instance. Or - or Portugal. Except where the weather’s concerned, they have more sunshine that we do but that’s not a government issue really…" 

"Shit.” 

“Malcolm, she’s off-script!” 

“Yes, and what would you like me to do about it from here, you baldy Bungle?”* 

Ben might subside into offended silence but all around him whispers began to rise and swirl like an Atlantic fog. “For Christ’s sake Helen, _do_ something!” Ollie yelped, his balls-in-a-grinder plea at least distracting people momentarily from the unfolding disaster. As the camera panned across a nodding audience the young advisor’s face, its level features contorted as if she were part of some nightmare Surrealist canvas, came into view. “Yeah, brilliant, that’s really going to help, sitting there with a face like a fucking flattened hedgehog!” 

“Nice to see someone’s taking a positive from this.” Dan Miller slithered through the melee to her other side, the pong of too much aftershave stealing what little breath Sam had left in an ever-tightening throat. “D’ you think he’d do a streak across the stage to spare her blushes about now?” 

“He’d sit there lookin’ like his cock had been shoved in the freezer, same as he always does,” Malcolm snorted. “Oh fuck not _that_ , you great blithering bat! Blame Maggie Thatcher not your own fucking party, how often do I have to _tell_ you, it’s that kind of professional fucking buck-passin' that won us three General Elections!” 

The monitor might be beginning to smoulder from the heat of his stare but the piercing descant of political stupidity kept on coming through. “Of course as the party of government of the day, we must take our share of the blame – we all make mistakes, well, my predecessor certainly did…” 

Howls. Gasps. Geoff Holhurst burying his head completely in one hand while Carol banged hers against the nearest hard surface. “Malcolm, this is fucking catastrophic." 

“It’s a Nicola Murray speech; what else did you expect?” He’d drilled her; threatened to have her entrails covered in glitter and strung up around the Lobby as Christmas tinsel if she wandered off the line like a drunkard at closing time again. But stand her on a stage with a microphone up her hooter and all his threats and instructions had a habit of flying straight out of Nicola’s empty rain-frizzled head. 

“Didn’t Helen take a fucking comb? She looks like she’s been shagged through a hedge backwards.” 

“Malcolm, I think what she’s saying might be more of a problem than the way she looks.” 

“Dan, most people stop listening the minute the gurgling useless mare gets past “good morning”, but I guarantee you there’s not a middle-aged woman in Britain not tuttin' away about the state of her fucking mop right now.” 

Every female in the room started nodding. “Helen should’ve spotted that,” Sam muttered. 

“Helen was probably hogging the hairbrush!” 

“Leader got a new puppy, has she?” Amused, Malcolm cocked an eyebrow. Ollie blushed. 

“Yeah, well you’d expect a _proper_ aide to notice these things. If Nicola wants to take the work experience kid for a day trip I don’t mind, but...” 

“Malcolm, we need a line on this.” Ben’s optic nerves were doing a tap dance, which at least spared him having to stare like a rabbit transfixed by oncoming headlights at the image of his leader picking up her spade and digging for certain defeat. “We can’t let her say we’re responsible for the bottomless pit under the Treasury! What next, admitting the intelligence basis for war was dreamed up by the PM’s youngest’s creative writing class?” 

“It’d have made more sense if it had.” Her voice droned in the background but Malcolm tuned it out with the ease of way too much practise. Wearily he rubbed a hand across his eyes, shaking off lethargy with a visible effort. “OK! Wakey-wakey! Everybody, hit the phones! Get onto every fucking hack you know! Those are Nicola’s personal opinions, not those of the Party; and anyway everyone knows she hates Tom’s guts because he didn’t back her Social Mobility bollocks.” 

“We’re not claiming she was misunderstood? Over-tired?” 

“Of course we fucking are!” Contemptuous, Malcolm flicked a casual V-sign Reeder’s way. “Confuse the tossers; it won’t be difficult, the pubs have been open for hours already. It’s personal animosity; points-scoring; mis-speaking, that’s what the witless bleating cunt calls it, yeah? Brain and gob aren’t connected; she doesn’t mean what she says or say what she fucking means, right? We need to make this into your run-of-the-fucking-mill Nicola Murray cock-up: nothing to see here, there’ll be another one along in ten minutes. 

“That’s the problem, there probably will.” 

“And it’ll bury this one if we’re very fucking lucky.” Luck, his weary tone implied, had been in short supply since the day Mrs Doubtfire was handed the keys to the Leader’s office. “Sam, get Mike at the _Star_ on the phone – I want him pumping out the line like his fucking life depends on it, OK? Oh, and if you’ve got the time…" 

“One coffee coming up.” She took the risk of giving his hand a sympathetic squeeze before disappearing. If nothing else it made her feel better when his long fingers returned the pressure. 

He should have been howling abuse at the television; yelling advice into his Blackberry at Helen loud enough for every effects mike in the City to pick up and broadcast via a profanity filter. He should be pacing the room, spitting venom and instruction at his staff and everyone else’s. 

_What difference would it make if he was?_

Studying her own reflection in the grimy kitchen tiles as she waited for the kettle to boil Sam finally conceded the point her boss had evidently identified before her. Nicola Murray, the Party’s choice – by a country mile – to lead it back to Downing Street was nothing better than a political shit-spreading machine. The brown surge rose a little higher every time she opened her mouth, and there were some tides even the greatest media manager of the age couldn’t hold back. 

Molten lead settled in the pit of her stomach. “We’re fucked,” she announced to the hazy reflection on the wall. “That’s why he’s not ranting. It’s just not worth the effort.” 

Sam Cassidy had never felt more like crying in the office, but she couldn’t. There was still a job to do. A pointless, hopeless job, but as long as he kept going through the motions so would she. 

Somehow. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Bungle the talking bear was a character on the kids’ TV show Rainbow during my childhood. If I remember correctly, intelligence and common sense were not his most notable qualities!


	4. Creative Accountability

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It had to happen. Nicola's managed to trip straight into Westminster’s biggest pile of dog-shit. Yet again it seems everyone expects Malcolm to wipe off the mess...

“What’s this then, the fucking firing squad?”

Lined up outside the Communications Director’s door before nine on a Tuesday morning they looked more like a troupe of delinquent teenagers whose misdemeanours have finally caught up with them to her. “Ah, well we may have a small problem with the _Telegraph_ tomorrow,” Helen announced, window-splinteringly shrill. Sam felt him wince, but she had to give the girl credit. Nicola and Ollie, so much more experienced in delivering bad news, merely cringed and mumbled incoherent sounds of (presumably) agreement.

“Well that’s an improvement on the norm, right?” He ushered them ahead, straight through her tiny workspace and into his. “I mean usually we’ve got a _massive_ fucking problem with them; namely that they’d sooner see Pol Pot or Lenin’s fucking corpse wheeled into Number Ten than Little Nicola Horner here.”

“Malcolm, this isn’t funny.” Nicola shrivelled beneath his contempt but Helen – brave or foolish, Sam still hadn’t made up her mind - tried to leap to her boss’s defence. “I just don’t understand how it’s happened…”

“Nothing new there then,” Ollie muttered. Malcolm slouched in his seat, directing her to his side with the crook of a finger.

Sam obeyed instantly. It was safer to be on his side of the desk, behind the lava flow when a major eruption occurred. Given the hangdog gloom and unrelenting shiftiness of the trio before her it looked like this one might hit Pompeian levels of ferocity.

“Er, well it seems someone’s leaked my last expense claim.” As her aides shuffled back, each trying to find shelter, Nicola fumbled and stuttered exactly as she did when caught on the hop at PMQ’s. “You know the, ah, the one you didn’t vet before we submitted it?”

“The one they asked for while I at my uncle’s funeral, yeah?” Ice, grainy and gritty, was settling in the pit of Sam’s stomach. _Not this, oh God no, please not another expenses scandal we’ve already got two ex backbenchers in jail._ The words ran through her head like a damaged CD, over and over. Malcolm, belying his relaxed posture, was ominously still, his voice a low, silky thread. 

Even Nicola in a flap knew what that meant.

She swallowed hard. Bobbed her head like a feeding pigeon. “We had to process it in a hurry and well… 

"myWaitrosebillgotcaughtupamongmytrainreceiptsandsubmittedtoo.”

Sam frowned, working to disentangle the individual words. She was halfway there when the most unexpected sound resounded around the room.

Malcolm was laughing.

Not his sharp, sarcastic bark of mock amusement; not even the sudden, unexpected giggle she sometimes got from him at the oddest moments. These were great gusts that convulsed his thin frame in long, ragged shudders. “Oh for fuck’s _sake!_ Why don’t you shop at fuckin’ Aldi like everybody else?” he spluttered, flailing in vain across the desk in search of a drink. Deft as always Sam produced a small bottle of water from her handbag and thrust it into his outstretched palm. “Thanks love, you’re a lifesaver.” 

“Well Waitrose is nearer,” Nicola began, automatically defensive before the innocuousness of the question hit home. “What does it _matter_ where I get my fucking groceries? Malcolm, this isn’t funny!”

“Sweetheart, this is fucking hilarious.” He took a deep breath, pulling himself back under control with a visible effort beneath four uncomprehending stares. 

Sam knew him better than anyone. She – usually – had more functioning brain cells than all the other occupants of Party Headquarters combined. Yet even she was eyeing him as if he, not the halfwits across the desk, had lost the fucking plot.

At least he’d once had it to lose Malcolm considered, grim resignation quelling his high spirits in an instant. Nicola – well, didn’t this just prove the useless gabbling Mother fucking Goose wouldn’t know a plot if it leaped up and smacked her on the rubber skull with a giant sledgehammer? 

“Every newly-elected backbencher knows to check and double-check his fucking claims before submitting these days. Even that pot-smoking, port-swilling pimp of a Chief Whip of JB’s makes sure he’s cleaner than Kate Middleton’s wedding knickers once a month at least, but you – how FUCKING stupid do you have to be, for God’s sake? I leave you for three days – three fucking days! – to pay my respects to my poor Uncle Sandy…”

“Well I asked Ollie to check them!”

Skewered by accusing looks from all directions the longest streak of weak piss to be found outside the blocked first floor gents’ did what he did best. 

He passed the buck.

“Yeah, well since I was trying to redefine your policy on social housing – you know, the one you ditched five minutes after the Glasgow train pulled out of Euston? – at the time, I passed the whole stinking pile on to Helen!”

“I thought you’d gone through them first! How was I to know you couldn’t be arsed…”

“Yeah, well since nobody else in this department’s capable of knocking up a policy in five minutes flat I thought we could trust the fucking classroom assistant to give out the pens, all right, or am I supposed to see to everything myself?”

“I am.”

None of them contradicted him. Malcolm flicked the smallest quelling glance Sam’s way, silently warning her to sit back and watch the two overgrown kiddies squabble on the far side of the desk.

“Yes, well when Nicola asks you to do something for her I expect you’re going to do it! That’s what a special adviser’s there for, isn’t it?”

“No, and if you were one, Helen, you’d realise a special adviser’s there to fucking _advise_ , not practise creative fucking accounting!”

“I don’t care which of you did it, but _one_ of you was supposed to check my fucking claim!”

“You could always have taken your head out of your arse long enough to do it yourself?”

It was a measure of her panic that Nicola didn’t think to argue. “Malcolm, what am I going to _do?_ ”

He exhaled a long, slow sigh that went straight to Sam’s knickers; the kind of sigh she usually heard after a particularly necessary office hand-job or a monumental Coalition cock-up (which invariably had a highly welcome effect on her lover’s libido). “Apologise?” he suggested.

“ _I_ didn’t do anything wrong!”

“No, you’ve only asked the poor bloody taxpayer to foot your family’s fucking food bill!” Malcolm thrust a hand back through his hair, leaving it standing in a wild muddle of soft silver spikes. “What signature’s at the bottom of the form, remind me of that? N.C fucking Murray, right? Outside of this shite-hole, that makes you fucking responsible, OK? Not your pouty wee girlfriend or the special needs schoolboy hiding behind her there. You!”

He wasn’t shouting. He was certainly frustrated - even annoyed - but he should have been hurling thunderbolts, expletives and (quite possibly) the paperweights from his desk around over something as embarrassingly avoidable as this. While he was determined to make his point, it was apparently deemed futile to ensure the rest of the building got it at the same time.

Sam wasn’t sure whether she should be relieved (his blood pressure was her concern) or disappointed. Because if anyone deserved to be frazzled to ashes by the skinny grey Scots lightning bolt it was Nicola: the self-proclaimed Immaculate Petitioner of British politics.

“I’m Party Leader, Malcolm. I don’t have time to look after the finer details.”

“Look, Lady Muck, your reputation for fiscal fucking integrity’s been shiner than Deputy Dan’s expensive new teeth up ‘til now, thanks to me. And by the way if you’re ever expecting to become Prime Minister, you might want to work on that _finer details_ shit, because it happens to be most of the fucking JOB!”

She wouldn’t reach Number Ten as anything more significant than new cleaning lady in a million years and he knew it. Peeking beneath her lashes at the guilty trio, Sam suspected only one person in the room still seriously believed otherwise.

“What are we going to do, then?” she asked, splintering the Arctic silence that had swallowed Malcolm’s short, sharp shout. He groaned.

“Freeman, Hardy and Witless over there are gonna fuck off; you’re gonna be a good girl and get me a coffee, and I’m gonna draft an apology. Nic’la, you’re going to eat so much humble fucking pie you’ll not be needin’ another grocery order this side of the Christmas recess, OK? Good, now fuck off.”

“But Malcolm I—“

“Which bit of _fuck off_ are ye too thick to UNDERSTAND, woman?” Impatience did when her incompetence no longer could; it blew the lid off the Glaswegian volcano and sent everyone in the path of the pyroclastic flow running for the door. “Jesus _Christ!_ Go and practise looking contrite instead of smug for a change, OK? You’ve got an hour, and you’d better not go off-script this time, right? Right?”

“Right.” Just before the door slammed in their wake, Nicola’s plaintive complaint squeaked through. “And I don’t look _smug!_ ”

“In fairness, she _is_ usually more vacant than smug.”

“Don’t you fuckin’ start!”

“Sorry.”

She didn’t sound it, but if she had Sam knew the effect would be diluted. Malcolm’s mouth twitched into a reluctant grin, the pen he’d been brandishing allowed to slip between slack fingers. “It was always going to happen, Malc,” she told him “Without your red pencil…”

“I should’ve shoved it up the vacuous mare’s shitter pointy end first before I went home.”

“You’d need something a bit broader than that.” Laughing she ruffled his hair a bit more before sliding off the desk and heading for the door. “Coffee’s on the way. Want me to type up her statement for publication? You know how flustered she gets with these last-minute press calls.”

“Yeah, we’d better release it simultaneously; she’s bound to cock up on camera.” Weary resignation didn’t suit him but she was becoming painfully familiar with its signs: the slight rounding of his shoulders as he bent over the desk; the slow, oddly reluctant scrape of pen against paper. As if the weight of bearing so much egregious folly was slowly, steadily, crushing the spirit out of him.

She couldn’t be surprised. Constantly being asked to hold back the tide had to cause erosion of even the strongest Scottish granite, but as long as only she knew it the world wouldn’t come to an end.

Not yet, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic has given me more headaches than any other I've ever written. There'll probably be one more chapter, but goodness knows when! Thanks for bearing with it.


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